Erik is an oceanographer and climate scientist. His research focuses on how ocean currents transport heat, nutrients, marine organisms and plastic litter between different regions of the ocean.

He currently leads the "Tracking Of Plastic In Our Seas" (TOPIOS) project, funded by a 5-year (2017-2022) European Research Council Starting Grant.

Erik is the winner of the 2016 European Geosciences Union (EGU) Ocean Division Outstanding Young Scientist Award. In 2013, Erik was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council.

Erik is a strong science communicator, with appearances on international television, radio and newspapers. He was a Media Fellow with the Australian Government Climate Commission and has co-hosted a section on sea level rise in Tuvalu in the international documentary series Tipping Points.

He is a sought-after international expert on oceanography, having done over 250 interviews on ocean circulation and plastic pollution with media outlets including CCN, BBC, NBC, ABC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, TIME magazine, AP, and Reuters.

[Jun 2014] Principle Investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant on “Understanding the effect of small-scale ocean process on tuna populations – a new tool to forecast tuna distributions for use in fisheries management” (AU$220k).

Committee membership

[Jan 2018 – Now] Member of the Mission Advisory Group for the new SKIM satellite mission by the European Space Agency (ESA).

[Sep 2017 – Now] Vice-chair of the SCOR Working group on Floating Litter and its Oceanic TranSport Analysis and Modelling (FLOTSAM).

[Apr 2016 – Now] Taught Programme External Examiner for University College London (UCL) on the Physical Geography MSc Degree in Environmental Modelling.

[Mar 2015 – Mar 2017] Member of the UK Future Earth Committee, on behalf of the Royal Society.

[Mar 2015 – Feb 2017] Member of the UNESCO/UNEP Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP) working group on marine pollution.

The amount of plastic in our ocean is exponentially growing, with recent estimates of more than 5 million metric tonnes of plastic reaching the ocean each year. This plastic infiltrates the ocean food chain and thus poses a major threat to marine life. However, understanding of plastic movement and its budget in the ocean is inadequate to fully establish its environmental impact, prompting the EU and G7 to recently make marine litter a top science priority.

It is now recognised that the amount of plastic entering our ocean is several orders of magnitude larger than the estimates of floating plastic on the surface of the ocean. More than 99% of plastic within our ocean is therefore 'missing'. This project will make breakthroughs towards closing the plastic budget by creating a novel comprehensive modelling framework that tracks plastic movement through the ocean. Building on well-established previous work to follow generic water parcels through hydrodynamic ocean models, this project will modify these 'virtual' parcels to represent pieces of plastic by, for the first time, simulating fragmentation, sinking, beaching, wave-mixing and ingestion by biota.

The new parameterisations that underpin this modelling will be based on field data and new coastal flume wave tank lab experiments. The simulated plastic particles will be tracked within state-of-the-art hydrodynamic ocean models, in order to compute maps of pathways and transports around our oceans and on coastlines and in biota. This numerical modelling will be used to evaluate a broad suite of scenarios and test hypotheses, including where the risk to marine biota is greatest.

The results from this project will inform policymakers and the public on which countries, for example, are responsible for which part of the plastic problem, crucial for mitigation and legal frameworks. It will also inform engineers on where and how to best invest resources in mitigating the problem of plastic in our ocean.

RoleProject Leader & Researcher & ContactFunding

EU grant: European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (grant agreement No 715386)